Most saw mills utilize dedicated gang saws to cut cants and dedicated edgers to cut flitches to achieve high volume production rates. Dimension lumber mills need to produce at high rates to maintain profitability because of the relatively low value softwood; in other words: throughput is most important. However, grade mills processing higher valued hardwoods such as cherry and maple can maintain profitability at much lower production rates because those hardwoods can be worth as much as 14 times that of an equivalent amount of softwood such as Douglas fir. The higher value of hardwoods makes yield of useful boardage most important. Achieving this goal can be difficult because hardwood logs may be very irregularly shaped.
For dimension mills, the critical cost factor focuses on maintaining high production rates and separate dedicated processing machines helps those mills to maintain those high production rates. But, because smaller hardwood mills typically process at lower rates, a smaller hardwood mill's critical costs are in the capital equipment. Currently, a small grade mill suffers the costs of buying two separate optimized systems to gang saw cants into boards and to edge flitches into boards, each including separate scanning and optimizer systems. This is not cost effective.
Therefore, it would help small hardwood mills to buy only one piece of equipment that performs both tasks of gang sawing cants and edging flitches rather than buying two separate sawing machines.